I just returned from the home of a long time friend who is,like myself,a victim of the current drug war ideology that permeates BC’s health care elites.Unlik myself,she isn’t someone with a history of opiate abuse.To the contrary,she is simply an unwitting victim of our health care systems ingrained opposition to the use of opiate drugs for the management of chronic pain.Unfortunately,I have a long history of heroin use and trafficking,going back to the 60’s.I actually started using with my wifes methadone,which she left in the fridge when she’d take off for days,weeks or a month.It was just to pass the time,as I was with our daughter,who was a pleasure,always.As a child,she also slept quite a lot.I digress,what I wanted to say was that this friend was in tears,once again,because her doctor was once again threatening to take her off of her morphine.Not because she was in less pain.To the contrary,she is much worse.He just thought she had been on it too long.This usually means that the college,in their ignorance and total lack of wisdom,doesn’t like long term morphine maintenance of any kind.She is getting a fifth of what I was getting per day when I was on morphine but it’s still too much.She needs hip and two knee replacements.Her pain is debilitating,but her doseage is very reasonable and s he has refrained from asking for more out of fear.Her pain isn’t being well controlled but she dare not ask for more,lest she be cut off altogether?She asked me,with tears in her eyes,why the BC medical people were so evil.Why they treated pain patients like criminals and made them justify every prescription on every visit and were constantly warning of withdrawal?This is a woman who is in constant chronic pain and is in need of surgery,for which she has no date.I told her I had been asking that same question for four decades and have never been given any kind of valid medical reason.There is no valid medical reason.These are the last of the prohibitionist true believers.They have it somewhere in their tiny brains that they are preventing the downfall of society.What they are doing is preventing the proper treatment of chronic pain in this Province.How to explain this in a Province with the only heroin maintenance program in NA?120 people won the lottery.They admit this themselves.The rest of us who have decades of ruined lives due to prohibition are the unlucky losers.Those of us who are unlucky enough to have a chronic pain issue are the worse off of all.They took away the one drug that was at least some kind of a mediator.They replaced it with another which they use high sounding and oh so moral reasons for changing to.This drug is nowhere near as effective as methadone and is causing problems in the majority of users.For those who have never been heroin users and are also in chronic pain,they get treated no better.In fact it’s because of the treatment she has seen through me,by the methadose clinic that she would never consider going to a methadose clinic.
aising 
awarenes
s of the consequences of prohibition.
While we have continued to fight the good fight,People continue to go to jail for what are,essentially,health problems.Others,like myself are left in chronic pain because our former drug use has made us pariahs to the BC College of Physicians & Surgeons and we cannot receive proper pain medication while in other jurisdictions people complain about being drugged into unconsciousness.It’s a small wonder that a society in which even the so called experts have no idea what they are dealing with or how to use the tools they have at their control.That the people we elect to office,most with no medical knowledge at all are getting it all so very wrong.Even in countries where a method of decriminalization or legal treatment options have been successful ,our political leaders scoff and say it wouldn’t work here.They never say why but one can only assume that they think their population is inferior in every way to those from Europe,where most of the gains have been made.One group of local politicians toured Europe and ignored every country with progressive policies and stuck to Italy,a country famous for it’s hard line approach to addiction and drugs in general.There are none so blind as he who will not see.Evidently,it is saner to propose a base on the moon than to take a new look at a problem that was created by politicians in an era where every vice was seen as the devils work and bad laws were enacted that it has taken years to rid ourselves of.This prohibition of substances with thousands of years of little harm has created a problem that didn’t exist until the twentieth century.Drug laws are historically the result of a religious fervour and no small amount of racism.They are aimed at controlling certain segments of society even though their use is often much more prevalent in others.This is only going to end in one way.Like alcohol,drugs are a personal choice and have been around for almost as long as man.Their use has a long history and has been tolerated or enjoyed by all segments of society since their discovery.People have made their choice clear with the use of their hard earned dollars.The harsher the law is made in an effort to deal with the problem the harder the criminal that enters the ring.Alcohol was controlled by the most vicious and deadly and so now are drugs.Our money and human resources can be better spent on education,treatment and where those don’t work,maintenance.The cost in dollars and cents is a no brainer.It costs 45,000 dollars to keep a man in prison for one year.This is money wasted in the worst possible way.People are picked up for minor drug charges and wind up facing murder charges just trying to protect themselves.Who’s fault is it that that person’s life is forfeit?When I was dealing in the 70’s,80,s and 90,s there were very few killings.What there were were over rip offs or personal beefs.Now people are shot for wearing the wrong color or being on the wrong block.This is not progress.I have watched for 43 years and things are much worse every decade.To do the same thing over and over expecting a different outcome is insanity.We need to drop this failed prohibition before things get any worse.Every year there are newer and more dangerous drugs.Without the market created by prohibition we would still be dealing with opiates and cannabis with a few psychedelics thrown in.Meth had already run it’s path and faded out.New pharmaceuticals created a whole new plague there.People used to take bennies.The harsher the law enforcement the worse the problem gets.Take it from one who’s seen it all before.As a species we are terrible at learning from history.I am seeing old fights that we thought were over being dredged up by a new generation of prohibitionists who are just as ill informed and are using the same debunked arguments as those from generations past.Even those trying to bring about change are insisting on doing the same work as in the past.This stuff is all out there.Someone just has to collect it all together and even then the politicians will put themselves and their careers ahead of the common good.That is our biggest problem.Willful ignorance with a personal motive.
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